Breaking Free is a blog (and metaphor) for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. You can check out some of the best and most popular posts we've written, have your questions answered in our forum, and get 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth FREE when you subscribe to get weekly updates →
Derek Sivers discusses the exact point I made a few weeks ago (with a much better example than mine)
If you sell pens for a living and someone orders a million pens, no problem! You just place an order with your manufacturer for a million pens, get them to the customer, and celebrate.
But if you do hands-on massage for a living and a recent spot on Oprah gets you a waiting list of 10,000 people, “you’ll wish you were in the pen business.”
This is Why MLM and Network Marketing Don’t Work - ask yourself these before getting too far into a new business idea
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Don’t Listen To Negative People
I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”
Scott Adams at the Dilbert Blog Forgets the Best Option: Self Employment and Passive Income Streams
Sleep: 8 hours
Exercise: 1 hour
Work: 8 hours
Eating: 2 hours (leisurely)
Hygiene: 1 hour
Travel: 1 (Commute, errands)That leaves you three hours for family time, sex, shopping, food preparation, chores, household repair, volunteering in the school, and so on. If you have a dentist appointment, or your talkative relative calls, or American Idol has a two-hour special, you’re tapped out.
37 Signals Celebrates People Who Quit Their Jobs
Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some of the most mundane, normal, average little companies out there.
These companies aren’t going to beat Google, they aren’t building a better iPod or bread slicer. There’s no “the next Facebook” and not a mention of angel funding. These entrepreneurs are doing simple things they love and making a pretty decent living from it.
Oprah discusses: What should I do with my life?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKZFeMLWeqE[/youtube]
Most of the time when we try something new we try to hide it.
We try not to make all the mistakes that we assume new people make. Once in a while (1 in 100) it works and we stumble upon something that we are a total natural at.
But for almost everything else in life, its pretty obvious that we are no expert the first time we try something. In fact, most of the time we downright suck at it for at least a year.
When I started doing brazilian jujitsu I was terrible at it. Every week for about 3 months I would go in and just get tapped out over and over again. It was pretty discouraging at times. I remember the first day I actually submitted an opponent (won) after about 3 months. He had just started and was even more inexperienced than me, and he promptly beat me again in the next round, but still…I had actually seen a little progress.
This is true for learning marketing, how to start a business, how to play the guitar, go on a date, throw a pitch, or dance salsa. Pretty much anything worth learning in life is like this.
A lot of people live their entire lives in a perpetual state of mediocrity at everything they want to learn just because they don’t want to admit to other people that they aren’t an expert. They aren’t ok being bad at something for a while.
They even get defensive if someone gives them advice. “Why would you even say what? I KNOW how to do that.”
I have the utmost respect a for totally clueless person who at least knows it and is eager to learn. I’ve been that person a bunch of times in my life.
But there is nothing more challenging to work with than a totally clueless person who argues with every suggestion.
I heard a cool parable one time about a man who wanted to learn from this old guru who lived on top of a mountain. He hiked up there, found the man, and told him his desire to learn. The old man said “very well, before our first lesson let us sit and have a cup of tea”. The old man began to pour the tea into the cup of his visitor. He kept pouring till it reached the top. He kept pouring and pouring until the tea had run over and was getting everywhere. The man leapt up from his chair and cried “stop! the cup is full!” And the guru said, “your first lesson is to know that I cannot add any more to a cup that is full. For me to teach you new ideas, you must clear your mind of what you already know”.
Do yourself a favor and admit when you’re clueless. If you’re not getting the results you want, let whatever ideas you have go and be willing to try anything that someone who IS getting the results suggests. You’re not fooling anyone anyway, they’ll admire the honesty, and you’re learning curve will go up drastically.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.”
-Unknown
About a year ago I walked into the local SCORE office in Houston and was very impressed. I waited only a few minutes for my appointment (which I’d made on their website) and was soon sitting across from an elderly retired gentleman in full suit & tie who was once the CEO of his own large successful company with over 100 employees (before he sold it and retired). We talked for several hours, he listened to my good ideas and my bad, was respectful and asked lots of questions, and occasionally offered sage like advice.
After this we kept in touch by email, I can go back for more meetings whenever I wanted (he volunteered about one day per week) and it was all free.
SCORE is an outstanding and under utilized resource for would be entrepreneurs. The volunteers are all former entrepreneurs themselves - which you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while is very important to me. You should only get advice from people who have actually accomplished what you’re trying to do!
Whether you have an existing business, or have no idea where to start, SCORE is highly recommended. If you are lucky enough to live in a city where they have an office, do yourself a favor and go make an appointment right now: http://www.score.org
Also worth reading: Maverick’s At Work
Old version: work hard (for a very long time), achieve success, earn freedom (to retire and do all the things you missed out on while you were working)
New version: find work that affords you freedom = success
Have you ever seen someone complain about a parking ticket as if it’s the end of the world?
Have you been cut off in traffic and let it ruin your whole day?
How many times have you let your experience at the airport (crying baby, delayed flight, missing luggage) be the first thing you bring up in conversations with friends?
I want you to repeat after me: “these things happen”.
We all have these types of events come up in life, but successful people just go on as if nothing has happened, and unsuccessful people let it derail them.
The next time you feel a surge of anger coming on over an insignificant event in your life, go over these points in your head:
If something this small throws you off, imagine how you’d react to a REAL problem in life. Overreacting tells the people around you that you can’t be trusted to deal with important issues. You’re not the goto guy (or gal) when they’re in need, because you can’t even take care of yourself.
Sometimes people ask me questions like:
Why take the risk of quitting your job?
I was just listening to Brian Tracy speak in The Psychology of Achievement, and he phrases it better than I could have:
Every single peak performing human being, every single high achieving man or woman, has been a person who has thrown off the natural tendency to play it safe and stay within the comfort zone, and has continually tried to exceed their previous levels of accomplishment, has continually moved forward into the risk zone, to try something more and bigger and better and more important. Every single accomplishment in the history of man, has come from men and women who have had the courage to take the risks, to step out even though they had no guarantee or assurance of success.
I would go as far as to say that it is IMPOSSIBLE to reach your full potential as a human being while spending a third of your life working for someone else. Make a quick list of people who really changed the world, helped others, and were wildly successful. Did they have a 9-to-5 corporate job?
I also love what Brian Tracy has to say about failure. Most people don’t try, and those that do give up after the first or second time.
This is the final part of my series on 6 Ways To Generate Passive Income.
Today we will discuss the final (and I think best) way to generate passive income. As I stated in the first article:
The way I evaluate any claim behind a method of building wealth or generating passive income is this: how many people can I find who have used this method to accomplish what I’m trying to do?
One of the best things I ever learned about success is to simply find successful people and model what they are doing, while ignoring the advice that unsuccessful people give you.
Is real estate a reliable way to generate passive income? Lets see…
CNN says that “Forty-six percent of those surveyed [millionaires] own investment real estate”.
Economics Edge says that the “real estate industry has produced the largest number of self-made multi-millionaires”.
Best selling author Brian Tracy did the research and says that 74% of millionaires are those who started their own business (included in this is real estate, but its unclear what percent).
(Interesting sidebar: less than 1% of millionaires consist of those who made their money in show business, sports, music, writing, inventions, or the lottery combined.)
So clearly real estate is a popular means of acquiring wealth. Many others have used it successfully. And investment real estate by its very nature is passive income.
I’m sure you can validate this for yourself by thinking of the wealthiest people you know or have personally met at some point in your life. Chances are they either (1) own a business, (2) own quite a bit of real estate, or (3) both.
Let’s look at the pros and cons…
This is a follow up to my previous article on How To Analyze A Killer Real Estate Deal, where I show you an actual property I looked at and purchased. The property is now fixed up and rented out so I thought I’d take a moment to show you how it turned out!
Fixing it up! Before and After Pics
The house got new paint inside and out, carpet, air conditioner, microwave, dishwasher, light fixtures, doors, landscaping, and a few other cosmetic things.
Here you can see the new AC, the old one was rather beat up!
Here you can see the new microwave and dishwasher in the kitchen. Overhead lights have been fixed, cabinets painted, etc.
White paint on the outside and raising the tree line improves the curb appeal.
I just had dinner with a friend of mine, we’ll call him G. He was stressing about finding a domain name for the IT company he started to “break free“.
If you want a great domain (not just a good one) and you’ve got $1000, buy one at sedo.com. It’s far easier than struggling to find one that hasn’t been taken yet.
But assuming you want to find one that is undiscovered and only pay $5.99 to register it…here is how you should proceed.
Read the rest of this entry »
One of the best parts about quitting your job to work for yourself is that you suddenly find time to do all the wonderful things you always wanted to do.
Sure, I was able to do some of these while working 10 hours per day, but I was frequently too tired or ill-prepared to get the full benefit until I started working for myself.
And when you build an active and interesting life by doing these activities on a regular basis, you can’t help but make a lot of friends along the way.
You see, the group activity is an excuse to see the same people on a regular basis - and really, if you hang out with someone more than a few times in the span of a month due to a shared interest, then by definition you are friends.
Some of those people you will naturally start to see more often, by meeting outside of the original activity (grabbing a drink, at a party you host, etc).
I think everyone should pick at least one item from the active category and one from the mental category. Read the rest of this entry »
A question from a reader:
Brian,
Love your blog. I’m devouring the information.
I really want to get into the property market and have a little saved for a down payment.
However, in my state (Australia) I have only been able to find 2 deals that has positive cash flow in the last 6 months. I put an offer in on one of them but didn’t get it. It was subsequently sold at a higher price that made it negative cash flow. The other was bought day 1. The rest are negative where I would have to pay weekly repayments. Not good.
Perhaps Im looking in the wrong places. Perhaps Im not thinking out side the square.
I would love some help!
Cheers,
O.P.
Hi O.P.,
Your dilemma reminds me of what I was looking at 6 months ago. I looked at a ton of houses before I finally found one that cash flowed. I felt really lucky to find that one deal and I thought it would be equally hard to find another one.
But I was totally wrong, because once I got a couple of good mentors, and they showed me a few things, I realized that on any given day in the city there were probably 20 or 30 good deals that would cash flow. They would go fast, and a few days later, 20 more would be there. I’m serious…I couldn’t believe it at first. I still meet guys almost every week who I talk to and they tell me “I tried that and there are no good deals”. They are totally convinced just like I was.
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